Thursday, June 28, 2007

EPRI estimates that a 500-MW solar plant would cost about $1.5 billion, or $3,000/kW, Bedard said. A just-built 64-MW solar plant in Nevada cost about $4,000/kW, he said. Nevada Power is buying the output from the Nevada Solar One project.

EPRI has had little involvement with solar power in the last decade, Bedard said. But climate change and renewable portfolio standards have renewed utility interest in the technology.

Currently, electricity from a CSP plant costs about 16 cents/kWh, compared with 7 cents/kWh for wind and 5.5 cents/kWh for coal, he said.

The real numbers provide a different story than the advertised ones. The plant has a name plate capacity of 64MWe, but an expected annual energy production of just 124 million kilowatt hours per year. If you divide that number by 8760 (hours in a year) you find that the average production will be just a bit more than 14 MWe (CF = 22%).

In contrast, if you built a nuclear plant with the same capacity, you would expect that it would produce approximately 475 million kilowatt hours per year assuming that the plant achieves a fairly modest 85% capacity factor - well below the current fleet average for the American nuclear power industry.

According to a recent report produced for Congress, the US Navy has estimated that the cost difference between a cruiser sized vessel powered with four new LM2500 type engines (with a total power output of a about 130 MW) and one powered with a proven PWR steam plant (essentially one of the two plants that now power aircraft carriers) is on the order of 600-800 million dollars.

This is not firm cost data and takes some interpretation, but it sure looks to me like there are available, proven, operating nuclear plants that are being built in the present tense that can come in for approximately the same cost per name plate capacity as a concentrating solar system.

The advantage that the nuclear plant would have is that it could produce and sell almost 4 times as many kilowatt hours per year.

I am also quite sure that there are ways to reduce the unit costs through increased production rates by spreading fixed costs over a larger number of plants than the one or two a year that are now being built for the Navy.

Only one problem - the Navy would have to have some encouragement to begin allowing its contractors to seek additional customers.

BTW - go ahead and make the "enrichment" argument if you wish. There is no reason at all for a commercial version of a carrier sized reactor plant to use HEU - the NS Savannah showed that a reactor large enough for a surface ship could do quite well with 5% enrichment even using what we knew about reactor fuel designs in the 1950s.

Regarding "The Cost of Concentrated Solar Power" (2007-06-28), there really is no no need for concentrating solar power in the US because there is a simple mature technology that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of concentrating solar power.

I refer to 'Nuclear Power' (NP), the technique of amplifying a neutron flux through the fission of heavy metals to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to run NP plants on demand so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days, or when the Russians decide to cut off the gas. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1957 and six million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. NP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.

NP works best near cool shores and, of course, these are not always nearby! But it is feasible and economic to decrease outlet temperatures using highly-efficient 'natural draft' cooling towers. With plant efficiency losses at about 3% per cooling tower, NP plants may be placed anywhere in the US. NP plants at existing coal plant sites could easily meet the entire current US demand for electricity.

In the recent 'EIA Electric Power Annual' report commissioned by the US government, it is estimated that NP electricity, which does not need to be imported from exotic locales, is already one of the cheapest sources of electricity in the United States, including the cost of cooling. A large-scale cooling tower manufacturing infrastructure has also been proposed by Alstom as a means of optimising the use of NP throughout the world.

Further information about NP may be found at www.niof.org and www.atomicinsights.com . Copies of the EIA Electric Power Annual report may be downloaded from www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html . The many problems associated with concentrating solar power are summarised at freedomforfission.blogspot.com/2007/01/commenter-referred-me-to-anti-nuclear.html .

That's brilliant. The only part lacking was that you didn't run fast and loose with the facts like the CSP fanatics. Since their claim of "half million Californians" being powered by CSP is true only for a moment at peak generation and only for home use, not commercial/industrial, you could have easily said 15 or 20 million people get their power from nuclear.

Of course to use nuclear power is much easier now then solar power, but solar power is absolutely harmless. There should be a way to use it effectively, just we need some time to investigate it. Using of solar power has a big future in my opinion.

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